


this bullet lodged in my chest covered in your name

by sugarybowl



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: M/M, Srsly three guesses who that OC actually is, but hopeful ending if you need to know that, it's alfie with my favorite arthur i couldn't help it, it's sad af as usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 23:18:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15828963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: Alfie is certain that he has been happy more than one time in his life, knows it for a fact, but there is only one time that he remembers.





	this bullet lodged in my chest covered in your name

**Author's Note:**

> *cracks knuckles* alright here is my attempt at an Alfie Solomons with a side of Arthur from Inception but feel free to read over him as a JGL shaped OC if it makes you feel better. Canon-typical violence and language please heed!

Alfie stands back in the shadows of his warehouse and watches. The two men standing by the crates are anxious and wary things, tall and dumb the pair of them.

“What are we waiting for, sunrise and the coppers?”

“We are waiting for Mr. Solomons,” Ollie hisses at their new loading man, “No shipment goes without Mr. Solomons bringing the rabbi’s blessing, now does it.”

“The rabbi’s blessing on a shipment of –“

“The rabbi hands Mr. Solomons a blessing, you hear, for good fortune on business,” he tells him pointedly, “the rabbi doesn’t ask about Mr. Solomons business so what makes you think you do?”

Ollie doesn’t mention that it is only the smallest shipments that carry this tradition and that what goes smuggled between the metal of the Shelby’s crates has no such thing. Alfie keeps him around for this and other reasons.

“Well said there, Ollie, well said,” Alfie says as he stomps into the room and raises a tightly wound scroll held in his hand, sealed closed by a heavy drip of wax.

“We send this here pile of crates off with the blessing of G-d for fair winds towards the heathen lands of America where so many go without. That they may have plenty and send plenty back the thirsty godless animals. Now,” he tucks the scroll into an unassuming notch in the topmost crate and touches his fingers to it for a long moment before taking a large step back.

Beside Ollie the new man is clearly shaken, as most everyone is shaken when Alfie Solomons comes in like a rumble of thunder that hasn’t struck lightning yet, “On with it then, what are we waiting for, the sun? The law? We’ve got bread to bake.”

\---

 “Thought you should know, Alfie,” Tommy Shelby says one day across the desk from him, “there’s people talking about you lately. Your own people, unhappy with their lot with you. Talk about how the bread isn’t going where it would make the most, going to some American boy that you trust too much. Talk about how you don’t have a proper family for yourself, no one to leave the name to but some nephews. It’s making men antsy.”

Alfie takes in a deep long breath, hands on the table and away from the drawer under his desk.

“I used to be a young man Tommy, you believe that? Not like you. You ain’t been young a single G-d forsaken day in your fucking life have you, mate. But me I used to be young. Yeah. Right down rosy cheeked I was. And I done some things yeah, that I don’t ask G-d to forgive me for. Things that mean I’m more liable to take a bullet to the brain smiling than a wife. But you don’t know about those things do you, Tommy?”

Tommy remains silent, stoic as only this man can, waiting because he knows there is more to wait for.

“No,” Alfie carries on, “you only heard something ‘bout some boy in New York. Alfie’s American, that’s what you heard. Sounds like something you should know, don’t it. Well I’m going to tell you one thing. Just this one thing I think it’s going to make the whole fucking difference in this deep bond of friendship we’ve built between us, mate. Gypsy and Jew. We get on, we do. I’m gonna tell you one thing and you’re gonna believe it like you’ve never fucking believed anything in this miserable life.”

He leans in towards Tommy’s unaffected form. He doesn’t stand or lean his hands on the desk to tower over him. He only leans forward in his seat and continues to speak just as calmly.

“If you, Tommy Shelby, if you think one more thought in the general westerly direction of the entire country. Nah. If your mind so much as starts to fucking wander toward the continent of North America. Fuck it, let’s throw the South in there, too. Yeah? If your tinkering plotting but ultimately tiny little mind turns toward the Americas and to any boys that may be of any consequence to me. You won’t even get to see them die, Tommy. Your auntie. Your brothers. Their wives. The secret’s out between you and I, Tommy, that I’m not of a stomach to lay a hand on children. But if you do err and commit this mental sin then that clan of yours, every single one, is going lose every limb before I smash their heads in. You won’t see it. You’ll just hear it, the squelching and the screaming and the echoes of the iron bars that I will do it with. Do you want to know why? ‘Cause I’ll burn the eyes out of your sockets before I do it.”

He leans back again, knowing that Tommy isn’t shaken because, so few things shake Tommy anymore. Knowing that maybe, maybe he’s shown too much of his hand and his heart, maybe he’s started to believe the front of friendship too much.  

“Keep that thought in your mind, Tommy,” he adds as he pours some Brown for him, “Keep it in the middle of your brain any time the devil starts to whisper in your ear and then we’ll be mates for always, you and I.”

\---

“What is it Ollie,” he says, trying not to sigh as his glasses slip once again, “You’re simpering. You never have anything good to tell me when you’re simpering.”

“It’s only we’re late on the shipment, Mr. Solomons.”

“And you think the tiny details like shipment schedules just fly over my fucking head. Is that it.”

“No it’s I –“

“So if you think I know about how we are late on the shipment, don’t you also think that I will fucking ship it when I am fucking ready?”

“Yes but – what we sent along with the Shelbys is selling quick and flowing easy but what we send…”

Alfie digs his thumbs onto the side of his head to chase away a headache, “Ollie, you tall, monumental buffoon.”

“Yes, Mr. Solomons?”

“What portion of our stock goes where all of you foul mouthed fucking traitors complain to Tommy fucking Shelby that we are misdistributing?”

“About… about 5% sir.”

“Right. So, do you think that 5% of the product that makes up only 10% of my fucking earnings is something that should be sniveling about in my fucking office at five to the hour? Or do you truly believe that you are fucking worthy of knowing what I do with every ounce of my fucking bread?”

“No.”

“Fantastic. Now, fuck off.”

\---

Alfie has been in the business of bread for a very long time, long before America was in need of it, long before bread was anything other than a warm comfort every morning. Once, Alfie Solomons had brothers and a sister who married a man who had set his heart on a life in America. One day, his sister came back with the man’s nephew – a wisp of a six-year-old under her coat – and no word of her would-be-American husband. Alfie had been ten at the time and the man of the family on account on several illnesses and more than a few men with guns who took issue with the strapping Jewish brothers trying to make a name for themselves. So Alfie, he knew he was in charge of what household was left – even if his sister had come home with the pretense of looking after him and her other ward as well. He’d be in charge of their safety and of making sure his sister married again, cause a young widow was still good as far as brides go and then he’d look after the little American runt when she went off and made her own babies. He would learn a trade and then teach the boy that trade and they would make their way. He knew all this and looked down on the quiet little thing who wouldn’t touch anything save his father’s old abacus as if he were a test from G-d.

\---

When the third week of delay comes about, Alfie sends the rest of the stock to join the next Shelby shipment.

He does not spend an hour writing in his smallest script and rolling up a scroll and pouring wax over it and trying to send parts of his soul with it.

He reminds himself that one cannot sit shiva for the missing.

\---

One day he finds himself in Polly Gray’s parlor, because his life is falling to fucking pieces.

“I heard say that you see dreams, the way your people does, yeah. That you can see the dead like they’re standing in right in front of you modeling for a painting,” he says as his hand reaches out in front of them towards the nothingness, “Tell me Polly, is that true?”

“What do you want with it? What reason have the dead to come and speak to you?”

He’s quiet as he stares her down because he isn’t. No. He isn’t going to beg but he just needs to know this.

“See it’s like this, Polly, I go to sleep and then I am awake. The sort of awake when you aren’t too sure if you’ve just had too much bread or you aren’t truly awake. Yeah? So then I wake up and I sees a figure by the doorway there. I know he’s staring right fucking at me but I can’t see, can’t make out his face. I know who it is though, no fucking doubt. Could swear to you with blood on a covenant, yeah? I know who it is. Then I wake again.  I look about and me and there ain’t a thing to see but the dust that my three fucking maids can’t seem to keep away. What’s that say, Pols – is he dead?”

She stares at him for a long moment and he stares back. She reminds him of his mother, she does, and that’s why he avoids her like the plague. If it weren’t for the fucking dreams.

“Alfie Solomons I never thought to see the day I would see that look out of those hatchet eyes of yours. Who is this ghost standing at the foot of your bed?”

“Is he. Fucking. Dead,” he roars at her.

Polly makes a show of lighting her cigarette for a near minute before she turns her eyes back to him, “Did he speak to you?”

“No.”

“He’s as good as dead,” she says before she takes a puff, “as close to dead as you can get, but he’s not dead yet.”

Alfie knows that nothing in his face twitches even if all of his organs are writhing like dying beasts, “What makes you say that then?”

“The dead don’t stay quiet once they come out of their graves, Mr. Solomons,” she says as she leans in close enough for him to smell the smoke, “They stand right beside you and tell you every sin you’ve ever committed against them and a few you only just thought of. If he isn’t there to tell you these things, then he isn’t dead – yet.”

\---

Alfie is certain that he has been happy more than one time in his life, knows it for a fact, but there is only one time that he remembers. People were always particular about their bread, went so far as to having it delivered to their summer homes by crashing shores that he is certain he might otherwise never have sought. He remembers one afternoon of dozens, after loading off three crates of bread to a stone house where you could hear the waves. He remembers a shared gaze and running off onto the beach, sand shifting right into his shoes while the other boy stayed behind, bent over and untying his and then taking off his apron and laying the whole ensemble down on the stone path before following after him.

“Take your shoes off, Alfie,” he said, all of fourteen and too much bones for his skin, you can’t feel the sand that way.

“I feel it plenty,” he grumbled back, throwing himself down on the beach. He remembers watching as the boy looked down on him and then crawled over to untie his shoe laces the way some women did needle work, carefully but mindlessly as if the task came as easy as breathing. He pulled one shoe off and then the other and his socks to follow suit.

“Now bury your toes in the sand, like this,” he had said, showing Alfie the way just as Alfie had once shown him how to dig his fingers into the bread and feels his way through it. “It’s good isn’t it?”

“Yeah, Artie,” he said, because he liked the way their names sounded like that, Alife and Artie, like a matching set, “it’s good.”

Artie had always laughed this way, mostly quiet but with his whole face. It made the skin beside his eyes crinkle just like an old man’s and it had done so since he was a 6-year-old runt following Alfie’s heels. Even when Alfie had been cruel to him in school, as was the thing to do with boy in younger forms, Artie had watched him with his crinkling eyes and smiled and known the truth. Alfie was the one who would follow him anywhere.

Artie’s hand buried itself into the sand just beside Alfie’s as they sat there, looking at the sea. He was still facing out there, his eyes still wrinkled in a smile but his teeth gnawing at his lip. Alfie turned to look at the ocean too, so that he wouldn’t have to see what Artie’s face did when he dug his fingers in and lay both their hands there, together, buried for them to feel.

Alfie looked out at the sea and not at the boy beside him. He told himself some day when he was old and dying he would come back here again, to feel as if he were in heaven on account of how he wasn’t going to get into the real place. Not when their hands moved in the sand to cling on to one another and the air ran out of Alfie’s lungs and he called that happiness.

\---

When Alfie is 23 there is a war. It is a war between a man who wants to make a name for himself and a man who wants to live a quiet life of fresh bread and anonymity. History would be surprised to learn who was at which end of the war, but it results in punches that cover the ancestral lands of kisses. There is skin against skin against knife. When lovers go to war, they say, it makes the valleys and the mountains of the Earth – it’s why the ocean is made of tears, they sing. For a year there is silence.

Then there is a telegram.

THERE IS A BAKERY ON THE STREET CORNER. STOP. CLOUDS OF WASTED FLOUR. STOP. YOU’D HATE IT. STOP.

Alfie sends back a package the size of a cigarette box and a note.

_Affix this to your door to keep away the evil spirits and those selling Bibles for more than your life is worth._

Three months later he receives an envelope from a part of New York he’s never heard of. Three pages of it are recipes and the last page is a schematic for distillery equipment. At the back of this fourth page there is the drawing of a crown, hard and dented by the waste of ink it took to make it just so.

It takes three more months, but Alfie talks a cousin’s wife into taking two bundles among her skirts, a gift for a friend he says, at the payment of her child’s school things.

THE BROWN IS UTTER SHIT. STOP. THE WHITE IS IMPRESSIVE. STOP. 

In exchange for financing her wedding whenever the time may be, he sews a hefty capital into the lining of his niece’s clothing and tries not to think upon how every fucker that still shares his blood wants to bleed him dry.

 _In my niece’s petticoat you will find enough for a proper bakery. That is all you will find in my niece’s petticoat. I will send you bimonthly both the brown and the white and you will find there are all sorts of tastes in the heathen lands of America and you are well to supply them._  

He receives an answer a month and a half later, tearing into it as soon as he can bark the post boy away. It reads like a telegram.

_Lovely girl. Eyes like yours. Attached find a photograph of your American branch. Much to report. Would be glad to give it personally. This will always be a place for you._

He reads the words over and over again. He imagines it. He tastes it. He closes his eyes and pictures it. He sits with a blank piece of paper for three days before he sends just two lines away.

_My affairs overseas will remain as such. What is mine is mine regardless of where it may be, there is no need to reassure me. Though you yourself may be assured that I will never falter._

\---

When Alfie is 26 there is another war. It is a war that for some is a long wait for the Americans and for others is a short wait for death but is for all an unabashed nightmare. Alfie thinks a great many times that the Americans can keep their men at home and away from all of this and he will never begrudge them, not while it keeps a New York baker away from the screams and the agony and the sight of brain matter on the ground.

But then he is there, near the end of it all, he is there where Alfie can touch him and see him and under cover of darkness he can once again kiss him and have him. He doesn’t care if they die here, doesn’t care whether their G-d is being vengeful or merciful in this. Artie’s eyes still crinkle at the sides and Alfie hears the crashing of waves far above the rain of gunfire. When they hold hands in the darkness Alfie thinks he feels their hearts beating against the black crowns they’ve inked into them.

When the war is over the years that have passed sweep over them as possibility stretches before them. Now, although their own desires are unchanged, Alfie is a man who has made a name for himself and Artie is a man who lives a quiet life of fresh bread and anonymity. When Artie asks to come home he knows he must ask because the streets of home are owned. When Alfie says no, he knows he will be listened to because he owns them.

\---

After the war there is nothing left to say save that Alfie Solomons has never in his godforsaken life kept silent. Thereafter there are a few holy words written like prayers begging for love and forgiveness tucked into certain shipments. They are answered only by the cold language of invoices delivered unceremoniously by harried mail carriers. But always they are answered.

Until they aren’t.

\---

“Heard the vultures are sniffing about your body, Alfie. That your own kin and your own people are coming to peck at your bones. What happened, eh? I ask out of Christian duty, you see,” Arthur Shelby says, chewing on something unpalatable as they both wait for Tommy like he’s been crowned fucking king.

“It’s no news to me, Arthur,” and he bites on the name more than ever before now. Artie was never Arthur to him, but he was Arthur to everyone else and he was and he was and maybe now he isn’t and all that will be left will be other men with a name that pricks at him.

He only liked the sound of it when Artie said it next to his and called them kings. When he mumbled them together into his ear and drew crowns over the back of his hand as he fell asleep.

“No suppose it’s the norm wouldn’t it,” the other man mutters, “people coming for your hide from every side.”

“We are men of business, your brother and I, well accustomed to the knives our nearest and dearest carry on the fucking sleeve every second they’re breathing the same goddamned air as us. And quite frankly, Arthur, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by antagonizing your betters,” he concludes, just as the man beside him goes for his gun and his brother enters the room stopping him with a look.

More’s the pity, he thinks – and doesn’t even bother to push the thought away.

\---

It’s December when he receives a letter from his sister, the one who married well and left two boys to fend for themselves. Then she married well again and left her mountain of a son in his care. He hasn’t heard from her in ten years at least but when he opens it, the hand it is written in is clipped and familiar and the air that had made a permanent exodus from him body returns to him. It still reads like a telegram.

_With Raquel. By the sea. Bakery burned down. Took the long way home. Let me in from the cold, Mr. Solomons._


End file.
